RIPR is a (paper) newsletter and a weekly column appearing in ten
of Rhode Island's finer newspapers. The goal is to look at local,
state and federal policy issues
that affect life here in the Ocean State, concentrating on action, not
intentions or talk.

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Aug 09 (38) - How your government's
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About

The Rhode Island Policy Reporter is an independent news source that
specializes in the technical issues of public policy that matter so
much to all our lives, but that also tend not to be reported very
well or even at all. The publication is owned and operated by Tom
Sgouros, who has written all the text you'll find on this site,
except for the articles with actual bylines.

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Tom Sgouros

Wed, 26 Jul 2006

Demonstrating that it really is all about power, the Bush
administration held fast to its insistence that it not cut farm
subsidies to US agriculture
(story).
Partly as a result, the Doha round of WTO trade talks have collapsed.
This probably isn't all bad, since trade liberalization has been
responsible for a tremendous amount of displacement and angst in both
the developing world and in our world, but since the farm subsidies
are in large part welfare for red states, it does show where the
priorities really lie.

Fri, 21 Jul 2006

An NCES report
using real statistics to compare public and private school education.
The prevalence of NAEP testing required by NCLB means there is now
much more data with which to make these comparisons. That is, it once
was the case that after you factored out race and class from the
equation, there wasn't enough data left to make a comparison. But
those days are past, for better or worse. A similar study came out
earlier in the year, and was featured in The Shape of the
Starting Line. See Lubienski and Lubienski (2006)
here.

Mon, 17 Jul 2006

Valerie Forti, of the Education Partnership, had an
op-ed
in today's Projo attacking my report, The Shape
of the Starting Line. But it's a peculiar critique, for a few
reasons.

First, she suggests that I omitted mentioning the negative impacts
of unionization in schools. But the findings she said were omitted
about unions are right there on pages 33 and 34, in the section on
unions, and there are four citations you can choose from for
corroboration -- Eberts and Stone, Milkman, Argys and Rees, and
Sanders and Rivers. Furthermore, I would dispute her
characterization of Eberts and Stone's (and Argys and Rees and
Milkman) findings that unionization has only "slight" effects.
"Statistically significant" is indeed a term of art, but it doesn't
mean "slight." Rather it means "large enough to remain measurable
after discounting other effects."

Second, I appreciate her admiration for Linda Darling-Hammond, and
her work on teacher quality, but discussion of teacher quality is in
this report. Should she have looked on page 29, Ms. Forti would have
seen that the report clearly does address teacher
quality, and cites authors that differ with her interpretations only in
degree. Hanushek, for example, cites teacher quality as second only to
economic status in the UTD/Texas study, and Sanders and Rivers point out
that teacher quality is worth as much as 50 percentile points to poor
students, in a study of Tennessee schools, and those are both described
in more detail in the report. The UTD and Tennessee data are, in my
opinion, the best available to make these kinds of judgments. Perhaps a
couple of mentions makes the report "virtually silent" on the issue, but
it's as much mention of the issue as is made of many other important
issues in the report. More likely, I suspect, she overlooked these
citations in her reading. It's an understandable mistake—it's
several dozen pages, and there's no index, for which omission I
apologize. Nonetheless, "cherry-picking" and intellectual
dishonesty are weighty charges, and I think people who make them
should do better homework to back them up.

But the really peculiar part of the editorial is it's complaint
about the report findings. As pleased as I am by it, it is little
more than an elaborate bibliography, reporting on the hard work of
many researchers across the nation and world. With that in mind, a
reasonable response to its findings would be to cite other findings in
disagreement, or to explain how my interpretations of others' research
might have been incorrect. Forti doesn't really do either, so I can't
respond effectively to her other points.

The findings of the Starting Line report are essentially a description
of how the world is: poverty has an effect on kids, as do good teachers,
poor housing, early childhood education and good after-school programs.
Ignoring the findings reported there is simply ignoring the state of the
world. Denying the findings without citing other research is simply
silly, like denying the saltiness of the ocean. The challenge we face
isn't to spar over data and university affiliations, but how to learn
from the data that's out there to create policies that really address
the needs of our children. It doesn't hurt to know how salty the ocean
is before you set out to build your desalinator, and I don't see how the
data and findings presented in the Starting Line report can hurt in the
effort to improve education in Rhode Island, and I am puzzled by her
insistence that it will.